A Closer Look At The Iron Man 3 Trailer Teaser - UPDATED

Having watched the Iron Man 3 trailer teaser, you may have found its nine brief shots to go past rather too quickly. Here’s a screen capture from each, and a little discussion of what they show. Discussion of some plot points will ensue.

Tony Stark normally seems rather happy to see the press, and will work them for all they’re worth. Here, he’s notably less shiny than normal. Something hasn’t gone his way – clues as to what exactly may follow in the coming shots.

But what is this building he is leaving? This isn’t anything like anywhere Stark would choose to live, so it seems he’s been here on official business. A courtroom of some kind? A hospital?

UPDATE: Little Bleeder Christopher tells us that it’s the New Hanover Regional Medical Center and it’s playing some LA hospital or another. So there’s that solved. Who has he been visiting, do you think? Ms. Potts?

Here, somebody is in the “Iron Patriot” style armour – or, apparently not, I’ve just misread the colouring – but who? And why is that scutter a) pulling one of the Iron Man helmets out through the glass in the background and b) wearing a dunce’s cap?

There’s more damage on the glass for the Mark 2, and that’s probably not the limit of it.

UPDATE: As Rich reminded me, this is from the Comic-Con sequence in which Tony tries to get the automated flying armour to attach to him successfully and it doesn’t quite work.

Marvel replicated this set, or close enough, at Comic-Con this summer, and images from the show floor show off the suits a little more clearly.

From the Comic-Con footage I can tell you exactly what these helicopters are doing. They’re flying towards Tony’s Malibu cliffside house, and they’re about to unleash a barrage of missiles.

The cut to this shot implies Tony is looking up and reacting to those incoming helicopters.

Note that he’s wearing the same shirt as under his jacket in the first few scenes, so this likely comes fairly soon after.

How do I know that it doesn’t come before? Because the building Tony is in will be blown to kingdom come any moment. It’s going into the sea. The shirt is going to get very wet, if not ripped up and damaged.

Here’s Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin. His rings are conspicuously absent, though he had a full sweep across his fingers in another shot shown at Comic-Con.

There’s quite a lot of rubble about here. Has this building come under attack? Or is it just somewhere rather derelict? Looks like it’s the latter, from this next image…

…of Pepper Potts in what seems to be the same run-down location.

And in some kind of scary constraints. And in the nude too, apparently. Not a good day for Ms. Potts.

There’s something more to this metallic construct than just restraints, I think, because the element you can see screen right has no obvious function. Yet.

There’s a rumour that Potts will get her own armour at some point during the storyline. Talk about going to extremes – from nude to a power suit; from captive to having weapons at her fingertips.

As far as we can tell, this sequence features a number of civillians free falling. We don’t know if they were in a plane that exploded or were just thrown out of one, but it’s a safe bet that they’ll die, and pretty quickly, without some Iron intervention.

There’s a chance that this sequence opens the film or comes near the top, that some of these people die or end up seriously hurt and that’s why Tony’s in such a terrible state in the shots at the start of the video.